He snugged the rifle tight against his shoulder, laying his cheek against the cool, black polymer stock. He zeroed the crosshairs on Seamus’s temple. The image in the night vision scope wavered crazily. Probably shouldn’t have taken those last two pain pills. He closed his eyes and held them closed for a ten count. Opening his eyes, he inhaled deeply, held it for a moment before blowing it out. He held his breath as he resettled the crosshairs on his foe. Easy now. Steady.
His finger tightened on the trigger. Seamus turned, his face plainly visible in the magnifying scope, staring straight at Noah but not seeing him in the darkness. The breath whooshed from his chest. He whipped the rifle down. He could not pull the trigger on an unarmed man. Not even one who deserved it as much as Seamus. He wasn’t that man, never had been, never would be—as much as right now he wished he could be.
Noah clambered to his feet, careful to keep to the shadows and avoid calling attention to himself. Lifting the rifle back up to watch Seamus through the scope, Noah saw him answer a call.
Rage purpled Seamus’s face. He threw his phone through the open window of his truck before opening the door and climbing in after it. With a roar, the pickup flared to life, flinging rocks and gravel into the air as the crunch of tires heralded his exit.
Noah’s legs crumpled, his bones dissolved, as he collapsed in a heap on the ground, disgusted with himself. Seamus’s truck disappeared down the road. A wave of nausea from the pain medication roiled in his stomach. Still Noah sat unmoving, clutching the rifle. All these years. All the torture. All the hate. And he still couldn’t pull the trigger.
He stood and flung the rifle away with a guttural roar. It hit the ground and fired off a round. The bullet ricocheted off a rock, screaming upward. Sparks flew. A slight ping followed by a massive boom knocked Noah on his ass. A spark from the ricochet ignited the combustible gases escaping from the open tank hatch.
Noah’s ears rang. Light seared his eyes. Flames danced, illuminating the night. He scrambled to his feet. Grabbing his phone, he checked the GPS coordinates and dialed 9-1-1. He raced toward the rental car.
“Bennett County Sheriff’s Office, what is your emergency?”
“Brooke? Noah Morgan here. I’m at coordinates 28.8419 north, 98.7575 west off of county road 1309. There’s been…”
The second and third tanks exploded, sending up a giant fireball. The shock wave slammed him to the ground. His phone shattered. Fiery debris rained from the sky. Slapping out flames as they landed on him, he continued crawling to the car. A giant piece of metal clipped his head. The world went black.
****
Get it off! Can’t breathe.
Noah swam back to consciousness swinging his arms, swiping at his face. Pressure around his throat strangled him. A band squeezed his arm, growing tighter and tighter. A cool hand brushed the hair from his forehead while another hand applied pressure to his shoulder, holding him prone.
He opened his eyes to find Cat hovering over him. My angel! She said something, but he couldn’t hear her over the ringing in his ears. She replaced the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. The pressure on his arm relaxed. The ringing lessened. “One-thirty-two over eighty-two.” She jotted the numbers on the back of the latex glove covering her left hand. “Not bad, considering.” She fished in the pocket of her uniform cargo pants and drew out a penlight. She flashed it across his eyes.
The bright light made him flinch. He struggled to sit up. Debilitating pain shot through his body. Warm blood trickled down his side. He collapsed back onto the gurney. His head felt like it was on fire. Trying to lighten the look of worry on Cat’s face, he said, “If you could take my brain off the hibachi, I’d appreciate it.”
“Not funny.” She checked the fit of the cervical collar wrapped around Noah’s neck and tightened the spider straps securing him to the stretcher. “Can you tell me your name? What day it is?” She continued down the scoring system used by first responders to determine the level of consciousness in a person after a potentially traumatic brain injury.
“Cat? Wh-what happened?” he asked, his words muffled by the oxygen mask.
“We don’t really know. Brooke called me. She said you called dispatch and gave your location, but before you could say anything else, she heard a huge explosion, and the call dropped.” Cat kneeled beside the gurney, using the shears to cut away the remains of his shirt. She stopped, dropped her head against his chest. Emotion strangled her voice. “My God! I thought we’d lost you.”
Noah jerked the oxygen mask off. “I love you, Cat.” Tell me you still love me. Please.
She jerked away from him as if burned. “Jim, your patient is awake. Vitals are stable. Pupils equal and reactive. A fifteen on the Glasgow scale. Looks like he ripped out his stitches.” She stood, clamped an arm across her slightly pooching tummy. “I have to get out of here.” The ambulance rocked as she stepped out.
“Cat!” Frantic, Noah struggled to get off the stretcher and follow her.
Jim restrained him. “Easy, bud, lay still. We’re not through assessing you.”
“Fuck that. I don’t need assessed. I need Cat.”
The paramedic pressed him back against the gurney. “And she needs space. I don’t know what you did—she won’t tell me—and to be honest, I really don’t want to know, but you messed up. Bad. Give her a little room. She’ll come around.” He tugged the scraps of Noah’s shirt out of the way. “In the meantime, let’s see what we can do to patch you up.”
A knock sounded on the ambulance door. The bus sank as Rhyden stepped up on the bumper. “How is he, Jim?”
“He can speak for himself. I’m fine. Get me out of here, Rhy.”
Rhyden exchanged looks with Jim.
The medic shrugged. “I strongly recommend he go to the hospital. He took a fairly hard hit to the head, has several minor burns on his lower extremities, plus he ripped open the gunshot wound on his side.” Jim glared at his patient. “On top of that, someone doubled his ration of asshole know-it-all attitude for the day.”
Noah growled. Ripping the blood pressure cuff from his arm and removing the spider straps, he sat up. Tearing the cervical collar from his neck, he said, “I am not going to the hospital.”
With a placating motion directed at his partner, Rhyden asked, “Can you just patch him up?”
Jim rubbed the back of his neck as he studied the bloody bandages littering the floor. He pursed his lips. “I guess so. I can try putting butterflies over the stitches. No guarantees it will work.” He glowered from Rhyden to Noah and back to Rhyden with narrowed eyes. “But he needs to get re-stitched…soon. And he’ll have to sign a no-transport waiver.”
“Just get me the damn waiver and let me the hell out of here.”
“Fine,” Jim snapped. “No wonder Cat doesn’t want to deal with you.” He rummaged in the supply cabinet, grabbing a handful of butterfly bandages. He cleaned the wound, a bit rougher than he normally would, and pasted the bandages over it. To Rhyden, he said, “Nothing I can do about the asshole part.” Snapping off his latex gloves, he grabbed the rugged laptop designed for field usage from the bench beside the gurney. Tapping rapidly, he opened a waiver form. Shoving it in front of Noah, he said, “Here. Sign this. Use the tip of your finger.”
Formalities completed, Rhyden helped Noah from the ambulance. Jim tossed a spare T-shirt at him. “Might be a little big on you but it’s better than running around bloody and half-naked.”
Noah caught the shirt. “Thank you, Jim.”
“Whatever.” The paramedic gathered up the used bandages, wrappers, and other detritus and flung them into the trash pail by the side door of the box. He ripped the bloodied sheet off the gurney before turning to face Noah. “I’m not joking. That wound needs tending.” His voice dropped to a mumble. “Damn good thing your head is so hard.” Raising his voice, he said, “Go on, get out of here. Before I change my mind and strap you back to the stretcher with the real restraints.”
Several hours lat
er, the fire finally under control, Noah and Rhyden walked over to the ramshackle farmhouse. They had already investigated the shipping containers and found nothing.
“Feeling okay?” Rhyden asked.
“Oh yeah. Fucking fantastic. I feel like I’ve been beat up, shot, run over by a dump truck, and these damn drugs making me woozy, but other than that I’m just peachy keen.”
“Do you need me to take you to the hospital?”
Noah answered him with a rude gesture and a glare.
“Fine. What were you doing out here in the middle of nowhere loaded for bear?”
“What do you mean?”
Rhyden crossed his arms in front of his chest. He stopped walking and widened his stance. “I mean there is no reason for you to be out here. It’s not in our county. It’s not even in our region. And what’s with the unregistered rifle? Why are you here?”
Noah shook his head and stalked toward the house. He stepped on the front porch. Boards groaned beneath his weight.
“I’m serious, Noah. What’s going on with you?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
He tugged on the rusty doorknob embedded in the wooden door. The sagging door swung open way too easily and way too quietly. Someone had been here recently. He flicked on his LED flashlight, illuminating the interior of the front room. “Son of a bitch! Call forensics, Rhy. Now.”
“What?” Rhyden shouldered Noah aside. “What the hell?”
Several racks of skimpy costumes and three vanities covered with a ton of cheap cosmetics lined the walls of the room. The rangers froze in place to avoid contaminating the scene. They swung their lights through the space. Through an open steel door on the other side of the room, stained, wafer-thin mattresses covered the far corner of the floor. A sparkle of green atop one of the mattress pads glinted in the glow of the flashlight. Rhyden darted to the corner.
“Rhy, wait.”
A bellow of torment escaped his chest. He slumped to the floor, clutching a blood-soaked, green-sequined tank top. “It’s hers. Bree was here.”
He stomped back across the room. Dropping the shirt, he grabbed Noah by the throat. Slammed him against the wall. “What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On? I’m sick of your sketchy behavior. Why do you always lead me to places Bree has been held after she’s gone?”
Noah smashed through Rhyden’s hands, shoving them from his throat. He pushed away from the wall.
“Are you somehow involved in this? How could you do that to Bree? She loves you. You’re her uncle.”
Noah bit his lip. The desire to confess was overwhelming, but fear of the consequences held his tongue. “What do you mean ‘do this to Bree’? Do you really think I would hurt her? Is that what you really believe?” He shoved Rhyden to the ground and stormed off, leaving his partner staring after him.
****
Driving away from the thwarted assassination attempt, Noah couldn’t decide which hurt the most—his body or his heart. He flipped through the radio stations, searching for his favorite alien guy on late night AM radio. The new guy wasn’t quite as good as the old one, but unless the dead really could talk, the new guy would just have to do. Noah wasn’t sure if he believed in aliens and the paranormal or not, although he had seen some strange things in his day. Tonight—he glanced at the horizon, this morning?—he definitely needed a distraction from the crazy thoughts bouncing around inside his skull.
Rhyden was asking too many tough questions. Noah could feel his time running out.
The station faded in and out. “Tell me more about your theory,” the host said.
A deep, evangelical voice boomed over the radio. “In the Bible in Revelations chapter nine, John the Revelator states ‘And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star falling from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft. Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth.’
“Then later on, he describes those locusts. He says ‘In appearance the locusts were like horses prepared for battle; on their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth; they had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. They have tails and stings like scorpions…’
“Many believers think this refers to a time in the distant future. It makes them feel better, safer, to think that. But they are wrong, dead wrong. The apocalypse has already begun.
“The smoke? Do you remember the images of the skies over Kuwait during Desert Storm when all the oil wells were burning?”
His thoughts mired in quicksand; Noah snorted. Really? He reached up to change the channel, but the next words spoken by the show’s guest stayed his hand.
“Those metal locusts aren’t mythical beasts from the future either. They are here and now. Helicopters. Think about it… Crowns of gold? Have you looked up into a sunny day as a helicopter swoops overhead? Those rotors reflect the sun, looking like a golden crown. Breastplates of iron? Armor, of course. They painted some of those choppers with ferocious teeth, looking just like a lion as early as 1965.”
The radio guest droned on, but Noah had heard enough. He slid the rental car into a rapid J-turn, heading back in the opposite direction toward Redus Crossing, hoping against hope that Trey was home. Noah had questions needing answers only the strange little man could provide.
Fifteen minutes later, Noah drove up in front of another ramshackle residence. The resemblance between the two locations was downright eerie. Trey’s house hadn’t fallen into quite the same disrepair as the house the captives had been held in, but it was close. An overgrown, abandoned airstrip replaced the helipad. Rusting shipping containers dotted the field beyond the runway.
Thank God. On the rotting veranda wrapped around the farmhouse, a familiar figure rocked. Noah unfolded his lanky frame from the rental car, stretched, and waved at Trey.
“Welcome to my humble abode, Ranger.” Trey stood and bowed. “Come in. Come in. Remove an encumbrance from your extremities. Forgive me for saying so, but it appears you were standing directly in front of the fan when the proverbial stuff hit it. What propels you to my doorstep so early on such an auspicious day?”
“Please, sit back down.” Noah gestured to the cracked and peeling white wooden rocking chair Trey had vacated before dropping into the matching one beside it. A yawn cracked Noah’s jaw. He tried to swallow it, but it was no use. He hadn’t slept in over forty-eight hours. A second yawn followed on the heels of the first.
Trey yawned widely, making no attempt to hide it. “Are you testing me, Ranger? Rest assured; I am no psychopath.”
“What?” He didn’t have time to follow his companion’s conversational gambits down the rabbit hole today. “You know what? Never mind.” Noah leaned forward on the edge of his seat. “Trey, what do these aliens look like?” He cringed for even thinking the words about to slip past his lips. “Are they gray men with long arms and big heads?”
Trey shot to his feet. His head snapped back. He stretched his neck up and dipped his chin to glare at Noah. “How…dare…you?” he stammered. “After all I have done on your behalf? You insult me like this?”
“Easy, buddy, I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Offense meant or not, it was received.” Pacing back and forth on the porch, Trey flapped his hands like he was waving Noah’s words away. His lips moved, but no sound came out as he searched for words.
Noah placed a calming hand on the other man’s shoulder.
Trey turned away, refusing to be placated and refusing to make eye contact.
Noah stepped in front of the old man, forcing him to meet his eyes. “I apologize. I am at my wit�
�s end. You are the only one who can help me. Please. What do these aliens look like?”
Trey huffed out a heavy breath. Dropping back into his rocker, he said, “Fine. Contrary to widely held belief, I am not the village idiot. These aliens are from south of the Texas border, not outer space.” He scoffed again. “Gray men with big heads. Pfft! You watch too much television. These men have dark olive skin, brown eyes, and straw cowboy hats covering their shoulder-length dark hair. They wear gaudy pearl snaps shirts left over from the late sixties and embroidered with large roses, blue jeans held up by white leather belts dripping with conchos and rhinestones, and roach-killer boots.”
“What the hell is a roach-killer boot?”
Trey rolled his eyes. “Your education is sorely lacking. These boots were all the rage in the 1950s. Roach killers are boots that come to a point at the toe so you can smash the roaches in the room’s corner.” He shrugged. “Roach killers.”
Noah shook his head. Learn something new every day. “Where are these aliens now?”
Trey checked the position of the sun. “They should be here any time. Tonight’s party night. Then it will be quiet for a few days before they collect more ghosts.”
“Where, Trey? Where?”
“No way. I’m not going over there. Nope. No way. No how.”
“Just tell me where to go.”
“I can’t. I have no weapons. My tongue is the sharpest thing I own.” Trey sat upright, board-straight in his rocker. He fiddled with the top button of his shirt.
“Trey…” Noah said, warning in his tone.
He rubbed his throat convulsively. “Please…” he begged, his voice rising an octave and cracking. “Please don’t make me.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I saved you. Remember? I saved you.”
Noah kneeled in front of Trey’s rocking chair, a hand resting on each armrest. “Trey, look at me, buddy.”
His eyes darted from side to side, avoiding Noah’s gaze. His skin flushed. An involuntary whimper escaped. “Trey?”
Broken Toys Page 23